The LG Wine II UN430 is a solid choice for making voice calls, snapping photos, and listening to music, and it's great for people with big hands, too.

In a world chock full of smartphones, the LG Wine II UN430 appeals to the minimalist. It's a quality feature phone in a classic flip form factor. It also avoids feeling cheap, which is something that plagues many flip phones these days. The Wine II is a good choice for anyone who doesn't like to text, but wants a cell phone with big screens, big buttons, and a decent camera.

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Design, Call Quality, and Apps
The LG Wine II measures 4.0 by 2.0 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.6 ounces. It's available in lustrous dark red and grey finishes. It's made entirely of plastic, but it looks and feels classy and substantial. The active matrix external display sports 128-by-160-pixel resolution and measures a healthy 1.8 inches. Inside, the 2.4-inch LCD offers 240-by-320-pixel resolution; it looks sharp and crisp. Beneath the screen are 10 dedicated function keys, including oversized Send and End buttons, plus a five-way control pad. If you're tired of diving through menus, this is your phone. The large, slightly raised number keys aren't separated. But they're big, easy to dial on and offer a satisfying click when pressed.

The LG Wine II is a tri-band EV-DO Rev. 0 (850/1700/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Voice quality was good overall, with a clear tone in the earpiece and no background hiss. Transmissions through the mic sounded natural. Reception was average. Calls sounded good through an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars). Voice dialing worked fine over Bluetooth without training. The mono speakerphone projected loudly across the room, and is fine for use outdoors. Battery life was quite good at 6 hours and 40 minutes of talk time.

We're much more enthusiastic about traditional feature phone OSes on a device like this than on a touch-screen phone like the Samsung Messager Touch ($29.99, 3 stars). The UI is speedy and easy to navigate with one hand, and you just don't expect smartphone power in this form factor.

The main menu consists of 12 icons arranged in a grid pattern. Generally, the menus make sense, with one exception: front and center is an icon for EasyEdge, U.S. Cellular's online portal. Whenever you want to browse the Web, you have to load this sluggish app first, and then navigate to the mobile browser in a separate tab and submenu each time. The Novarra 7.5 browser looked good, and featured sufficient resolution for crisp WAP pages. The Networks-In-Motion powered GPS app delivers voice-enabled, turn-by-turn directions. A demo version of Namco's Pac-Man takes up an entire main icon for some reason.

Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The side-mounted microSD card slot worked fine with my 32GB SanDisk card, though the card went in rather far and was tough to eject. There's also 114MB of free internal memory. The non-standard 2.5mm headphone jack is a disappointment, since you'll need an adapter for any third-party earbuds that actually sound good. At least LG throws a stereo pair in the box; music tracks sounded fine through these, aside from a total lack of bass response. The built-in stereo FM radio uses the bundled earbuds as an antenna. Music also sounded full and clear through Samsung Modus HM6450 ($99, 4 stars) stereo Bluetooth headphones. The app is easy to use, though it only played my MP3 files. 3GP format video files also played back fine, though this isn't a media phone.

The 2-megapixel auto-focus camera has no flash. Most test photos looked a bit smeared, with blown-out highlights indoors by the windows. Outdoor shots were better, and colors were sufficiently vibrant. Shutter speeds were below average; I lost a few shots to motion blur. Recorded 176-by-144-pixel videos were puny, dim, and useless at 12 frames per second.

All told, the LG Wine II delivers as a midrange flip phone. We're going to give it our Editor's Choice because it's well balanced, delivers what it promises, and manages to feel reasonably current. That said, it isn't the best phone for everyone. Heavy texters would do better with the Samsung Messager Touch, a QWERTY slider with a 2.6-inch touch screen and a better music player. But the Messager Touch's UI isn't as responsive, and it's much tougher to dial numbers on and navigate its cluttered menus. The Motorola Grasp (Free, 3.5 stars) is another good texting option, although it's more like a mini-BlackBerry, with its slab form factor and always-exposed keyboard. Finally, if you're seeking more power at a low price, the LG Optimus U ($29.99, 4 stars) is a terrific entry-level Android smartphone.

Jamie Lendino is the Editor-in-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also been published in Popular Science, Consumer Reports, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision, as well as...
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